Stop Trying to Be Creative

Like many of you, many of us with WU followed FiveThirtyEight regularly throughout the election. When a fascinating article about creativity came through the pipeline, we reached out to writer Christie Aschwanden — FiveThirtyEight’s lead writer for science — to ask permission to reprint the piece for WU. Happily for us, permission was granted (Thanks,Christie and David).

I recently finished a story I’d spent several months obsessing over. When I pitched the piece to my editor, I knew that I’d found a worthy subject, but I couldn’t quite articulate what the story was about. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the words — it’s that I didn’t have an answer yet. All I knew was that I had something interesting that I couldn’t help pursuing, even if I had no clue what it would become.

After months of dissecting research papers, interviewing experts, stumbling down “dabbit holes” (as we call them here at FiveThirtyEight1) and not writing a single draft, my editor gave me a non-negotiable deadline, and I spiraled into a well of despair. I had a desk cluttered with scientific papers, a hard drive stuffed with gigabytes of research and three chalkboards covered in illegible notes, yet still no tangible form for my obsession. Only in the final hours, with the deadline closing in, did something resembling a story emerge. The first draft that I puked out was no masterpiece, but it was finally something. All those scribbles and stacks of paper were necessary steps, but only in retrospect can I see where they were pointing me.

When I told this story to University of Central Florida computer scientist Kenneth Stanley, he nodded in recognition. I met Stanley, a mild-mannered artificial intelligence researcher, without intending to. We were at the Santa Fe Institute, where he was spending a sabbatical and I was in residence as a journalism fellow. Stanley had stumbled upon an algorithmic principle that pointed the way to creativity in science, art, culture and life, a principle he outlines in a new book, “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective.” He told me that a computer algorithm he’d created suggested that my chaotic, unstructured writing process was the ideal way to produce creative work.

The story of how he discovered this concept, Stanley told me, is an example of the idea itself. He invented an algorithm called NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) with the purpose of evolving artificial neural networks. Soon, other programmers were building computer apps that used NEAT to evolve pictures. “I was fascinated,” Stanley said. Although he’d invented the algorithm, it had never occurred to him that it could be used to make art. He was hooked, and he and some colleagues created a website called Picbreeder where anybody could use NEAT to breed pictures the way you might breed a dog or cat.

In Picbreeder’s nine years of operation, its users have evolved nearly 10,000 images. It works by first showing the user a grid of 15 images like the one below.

Stanley calls these “blobs.” You select a blob — the one in the center, say — and then the algorithm takes it and produces children.

You pick one of the children, which then has its own children, and so on. The starting blobs have random topologies and don’t look like real objects. But as users kept selecting the new, spin-off blobs, something larger emerged. The images below were created via Picbreeder’s evolutionary process — users evolved color along with everything else. “These are not artist renderings or anything like that,” Stanley said, “and yet they look like things from nature.” Furthermore, this wasn’t just one fluke result. Users were regularly evolving complex pictures that looked like real things. Stanley started wondering, why are people so consistently finding interesting things?

He found an answer by playing Picbreeder. Out of the blue one day, Stanley created a car. “I wasn’t looking for a car,” he told me, and when he discovered it, his immediate reaction was, “What just happened? How did I just do that?”

Stanley had started with an image that had two circles inside of an oval. “I thought it looked like an alien face, sort of like E.T.,” he said. He picked the alien face thinking that he’d evolve some more E.T.s. But it didn’t happen that way. As the images evolved, the eyes of the alien started to descend, and at some point they began looking like wheels. “In hindsight, you can see the eyes turning into the wheels, but looking forward, you’d never be able to predict something like that,” he said. Most people wouldn’t look at the first picture and say, yeah, I’m going to turn that face into a car, yet that’s exactly what happened.

Stanley could have assumed that he’d won the Picbreeder lottery with a lucky event. But when he looked back at the path that users had taken to get butterflies and skulls and teapots and sunsets, he found that it was always the same story. None of the precursors looked like the final products. No one got a butterfly by selecting the blob that looked most butterfly-like. In fact, Stanley says, if you pick the picture in each round that looks most like the butterfly, you never get the butterfly.

The same sort of blind process happened in another series of experiments where Stanley and Joel Lehman instructed robots to work toward defined objectives. In one experiment a bipedal robot programmed to walk farther and farther actually ended up walking less far than one that simply was programmed to do something novel again and again, Stanley writes. Falling on the ground and flailing your legs doesn’t look much like walking, but it’s a good way to learn to oscillate, and oscillation is the most effective motion for walking. If you lock your objectives strictly on walking, you won’t hit that oscillation stepping stone. Stanley calls this the “objective paradox” — as soon as you create an objective, you ruin your ability to reach it.

Although this openness to new ideas might sound like just waiting around for serendipity to strike, it’s a more deliberate process. For instance, Picbreeder users don’t select pictures completely at random — they pick ones that have some intrinsic potential. They don’t know that a particular blob will lead to a butterfly, Stanley said, “but they understand that this is a path that’s worth going down for nonrandom reasons.” Simonton’s research has similarly shown that the best predictor of creative achievement is an openness to experience and cognitive exploration.

None of this means that goals don’t have a place, but they’re not a great driver of creativity. Rather than beginning with a specific goal, most creative people “start out with with a hazy intuition or vision,” Kaufman told me. “After a lot of trial and error they get closer and closer to discovering what their idea is and then they become really, really gritty to flesh it out.”

Objectives are fine when you have a modest goal and the path to get there is clear. “I would sound like a kook if I was like, no one ever should have an objective ever again,” Stanley said. “If I want some lunch, I’m not going to just wander around until I stumble upon a sandwich.” But if you’re trying to create something new, an objective can stand in your way.

Seeking novelty instead of objectives is risky — not every interesting thread will pay off — but just like with stocks, the potential payoffs are higher. (It’s no coincidence that Stanley and I were having our conversation at the Santa Fe Institute, where patron writer Cormac McCarthy has written failure into the institute’s mission statement and offices are shared among researchers from different fields, because you never know what they’ll learn from each other.)

When I’m mired in a pile of overwhelming reportage, sudden insights arrive when my frustration is at its peak. It’s the point where, like that robot flailing its legs, I’m forced to try something completely different because I’ve depleted the most obvious options. After reading Stanley’s book, I’ve started to think of those moments of frustration as prerequisites to creativity instead. I’ve also gained a little more faith in my messy methods. When I give myself space to let ideas percolate, good things happen naturally.

Comments

What a fascinating perspective. Thanks so much for sharing this. And as I sit here writing random thoughts about what’s going to happen next in my WIP, and not seeing anything clearly, I’m feeling good about that randomness rather than frustrated.

Cool. Science affirms that play, openness, and serendipity lead to creative breakthroughs. In the realm of fiction writing, pantsers are rejoicing, and why not? It works. Science proves it.

But I’d like to point out a key detail in this excellent piece. Not all starting points are created equal. Some have “intrinsic potential”.

For fiction writers, the starting point we are talking about is a premise. Not every premise will turn into a great novel. Those that do sweep us into a story world–but a world with built in conflict. They entrance us with memorable characters–who are memorable because they are admirable, passionate, engaged, self-aware, larger than life, and beset by inner conflict.

Did I mention conflict?

A solid premise is plausible (that could really happen!), has inherent conflict (the more irresolvable the better), is original (shows us something in a new way), and has gut emotional appeal. A solid premise also develops. Creating it is a process.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere about this stuff, so I’ll just point out that creative breakthroughs are not just about starting with a blob and making random choices. In writing fiction, the choices are guided by our underlying instinct for conflict.

Don, I loved this, “A solid premise is plausible (that could really happen!), has inherent conflict (the more irresolvable the better), is original (shows us something in a new way), and has gut emotional appeal. A solid premise also develops. Creating it is a process.”
Yes. Yes. Yes. Wonderful.

The important part of the algorithm is left out, that the user chooses a picture at each step. Any picture can have intrinsic potential to the right user. Plausibility, conflict, originality and emotional appeal do it for you, and define the potential of each image for you. I don’t have those in my head (werewolves on the moon? Killing ghosts for a living? Not very plausible), or I have others (multiple individual plots braided together to resolve a conflict no individual knows about, rather than a single actor pursuing a defined goal), or the intensities are different, and so the potential in the images is different for me. Your list may be an agent’s list, or a publisher’s list, but it isn’t necessarily a creative writer’s list.

What a wonderful thought!
I often think to myself, when working on a new book, that the details are there, they just haven’t come to me yet, haven’t formed. Nice to hear there is a method to my madness!

What fascinating research! Reminds me of fractals and how you get complex patterns through repetition.

Don is right about the starting point and also the process. Not everything is going to be amazing.

Note how many of the pictures are face like (both human and non). About a third. Perhaps only a couple are striking. But the ones that stand out are the ones that are like no other. It’s a good analogy for the books that are exceptionally good and those that are merely good and competent.

I love this. I’ve often been drawn to random bits of history or people and obsess over them for no reason that seems to connect to work at all. And then–just like Christie discovered–the information coalesces with other bits of information into an idea I can actually use. That’s what I mean when I say I’m feeding the girls in the basement. I give them things that interest me and they swirl it all together and offer me something they think I might like.

Which for me is often the premise, not the other way around. (Speaking to the above discussion.)

While I do begin with an idea and an initial objective, things can change dramatically. For example, after much trial and error and whole chapters written and discarded or reworked, my current WIP has morphed from a straight historical into a time travelling novel with my protagonist sharing the mind and body of someone from the distant past.

Once I landed on this I knew I had the vehicle to best tell my story. My eyes had morphed into a car!

Thank you, Christie, for tearing down the edifice of everything I thought was true.

Pause for pregnant sigh. (Sigh …)

I’m going to discuss this first not on the level of authorial creativity but on the level of character and story.

Trained as an actor, I learned that the objective in any scene was its beating heart, the driver of the engine. The fact that another character stood in the way created the all-important conflict that generated drama.

I still believe that is true. But what you’ve qualified — and which I think is the important takeaway — is that characters may be confused, mistaken, or even flat wrong about what it is they actually want.

In fact, some of the greatest stories are in this vein — the folly of desire, and our inherent, even willing blindness in knowing what it is we truly crave.

And the great discovery lying in wait at the end of such a story is the realization of how wrong the character was (and why), and perhaps the understanding of what it was she truly wanted, but didn’t realize because of some mistake, or fear, or denial.

This is the truth behind “success through failure” — it’s through failing to get what we want that we grow to a deeper awareness of ourselves and our world — and perhaps what we really truly want.

However, that doesn’t mean all goals or objectives are misbegotten. Frodo knows what he must do with the ring. Kitness Everdeen knows she must not merely survive but prevail in the games. Here the surprising discovery lies in what it will take to succeed.

Can a writer genuinely allow her characters to meander in search of their story? Of course. In the initial drafts.

But come the all-important revision process, recognizing the centrality of even patently ridiculous or counterproductive goals is inescapable.

And I guess that is my final point. Meandering meaningfully is indeed the heart of creativity. But not in the rendering of what is merely creative into genuine art. Once we experience our discovery, we need to pare away the inessential. Some dead ends will need to remain — they’re essential to the failures that created success. But others are simply, purely dead ends.

It’s always seemed magical to me how I’ll be writing along with my plan, and then bam! this amazing insight or plot twist will strike and it’s like, “Why didn’t I think of that before.” But really, I suppose everything had to mull around and simmer together in my subconscious before it could really form into something unique and better.

I appreciate your post especially because I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity and story ideas lately. I know many people who have swarms of ideas and that’s just not me. It’s even made me doubt how creative I am. I seem to be more linear, and your post gives me hope that if I just write and explore one idea, it will evolve and lead to another and another and another. I don’t have to have an over-crowded abundance of ideas. I just have to have one, and then start writing, trusting the process to lead me on. Thank you!

I for one am hoping trial and error pays off, because that has been my writing life for too long. But really, this article makes a lot of sense. You wander around in mucks of story threads and wonder how it will ever come together, when the whole process is making it happen. Sigh.

Isn’t this a little like the tech version of Carol Dweck’s growth mindset? The challenge is to keep moving and learning despite an often non-linear path toward success? Minimize spent the time in bemoaning challenges; instead, mindfully practice/iterate, then be alert to breakthroughs.

Also, Picbreeder is fascinating, but I’m assuming people stop choosing blobs when their products have reached a point of personal meaning–i.e. a car-like vehicle. That says something about how our past creates the filter with which we view the present. For example, if I had no experience with automobiles of any kind, even at the level of an image, who’s to say I’d have stopped playing this game upon creating a car? So declaration of “success”, in this context, is very much personally and culturally-dependent. Another way of saying we see the world not as it is, but as we are.

When different fields end up saying the same thing, it’s a hint that science is grasping something true. Cool beans.